Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

“So he was…”

“My dad was okay. He is okay. He tries. In fact I think of myself as complementing his efforts from below. As a family we are a pincer attack, you might say. Not that he would agree with that. But I’ll convince him of it by the time it’s all over. I’ll make him see it. If he doesn’t die first of a heart attack at how bad I am.”

Another time she put her head back onto her chair back and sighed heavily. “But what about you?” she said again. “And don’t answer with a question.”

Fred shrugged.

“What brought you to the moon?”

“Just my job.”

“I know that. You are a quantum mechanic.” She laughed briefly. “But what brought you to your job?”

“Oh I don’t know.”

“You must like quantum mechanics?”

Fred tilted his head and thought about it. “Yes. I do.”

“So go on. Go backward from that. What brought you to quantum mechanics?”

“Oh I don’t know.”

Fred was not comfortable. He didn’t know what he could say about his past. He didn’t understand it himself, so how could he explain it to someone else?

She waited him out, watched him think it over. Not a warm look, but not a sharp look. Not irritated or annoyed or suddenly furious. Just watching. Curious. They had a lot of time. He wasn’t going to be able to outwait her. This was unusual; almost everyone else he had ever met in his life would get uncomfortable with his silences and then fill them, and he would be off the hook. Not this time.

“I didn’t fit in,” Fred finally said, surprising himself. “I never could quite get why people did what they did. I didn’t understand them. Or, I just couldn’t think fast enough. So everything was kind of mysterious. And, and, and… disturbing. So then, in my math classes, I could understand things. Things were clear. Like algebra. I liked algebra. Everything balanced out. And I could see things in geometry. Trig was geometry as processed by algebra, so I liked that too. Calculus was easy.”

She laughed. “That’s not a sentence you hear very often.”

“No, it’s easy. And then there was a little introductory unit on quantum mechanics, kind of to dispense with it and move on. And what the professor said about it was so weird and, and—and unlikely, that I got into it. It was interesting.”

“So that’s your biography? A list of your math classes?”

“I guess so.”

“What else did you do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what else did you do! In your life! Sports? Music? Theater? Dance? Travel? Friends? Romances?”

“No,” Fred said. That sounded a little extreme, all by itself, and so he added: “I mean, I had some friends.”

“Okay, good. That’s a start. Are you still in touch with them?”

“No.”

“Wow.” She stared at him. “You were a real geek.”

Fred sighed. “That’s one name people use.”

“What, there are others?”

Fred glanced at her, looked back at the floor. “You know there are.”

“What, like what?”

“Just saying it repeats it,” he said, swallowing hard.

“Really? That bad?”

He shrugged. “To think you’re a person, and then be told you’re a symptom? A diagnosis?”

She considered him. “Welcome to the world,” she suggested.

“Well I don’t like it,” he muttered. Then he added, more bitterly: “As if anyone knows. As if they know anything about it.”

She stared at him for a while. “I think I know what you mean. So, you suffered the slings and arrows of youthful geekdom.”

Fred nodded. Trying to remember: but in fact he was better at not remembering. “I guess so. But quantum mechanics gave me a way to—to do something. I could do the equations, I mean it’s a math, just like any other math, not that hard compared to some maths, but the results—or what the equations suggest about reality, because they work—it’s so counterintuitive. So bizarre compared to what we see in our sensory world, that, I don’t know. I found it interesting. And not everyone gets it. It’s not that hard as a math, but it is hard as a thing to understand. Like impossible. So I pursued it, and now, there’s more and more technology that is quantum mechanical. Including secure communications tech, which a lot of people want. So it’s a… it’s a way.”

“A way? To make a living?”

“A way.”

“A way?”

“Just a way. A way to be.”

“Like Daoism.”

“I don’t know. People do like to try to link quantum mechanics to something more tangible. Tangible or mystical.”

“You don’t?”

“I suppose I do. The thing about quantum mechanics is that when you try to make it make sense by analogy to something at our level of perception, it’s always a misrepresentation, so the real thing slips out of your grasp. You’re getting it wrong. So for a long time I preferred to keep it at the level of the math, and not try to explain it at all.”

“For a long time? And then something happened?”

“Well, yes.” Fred sat up on the couch, stirred by the thought. “People are using the math to design and build machines. More and more qubits are being stabilized in various ways. So something real is happening, something physical. So I started thinking about what the quantum realm was really doing, I mean in the physical world. I mean clearly it’s doing something. And the idea that it’s an entirely statistical probability state, that takes consciousness or measurement to make it collapse to an event—or that there are new universes branching out of every moment—none of that was working for me. There are several different interpretations of what the math is describing, because it’s so weird, but most of them just struck me as crazy.”

After he was silent for what might have been some time, thinking about this, she said sharply, “And then?”

Fred thought about it some more. “Then,” he said, “I started thinking more about the pilot wave interpretation. Have you heard of that one?”

She shook her head. “Tell me.”

“Well, people talk about the Copenhagen interpretation, which came mostly from Niels Bohr. His idea was that physical reality was a matter of probabilities, like the equations are, and that things at the subatomic level are undetermined until measured, at which point they become one thing or the other. Waves become particles, and particles add up to waves, but not in ways that make sense according to our senses, so in the end it’s too strange to understand.”

“That’s not much of an interpretation?”

“No. Einstein didn’t like it, Penrose didn’t like it. But the math definitely works, right down to the parts-per-trillion range. So it’s been hard to say how Bohr’s take on it is wrong. But right from the beginning, a physicist named de Broglie said there was another way of understanding it, which was that quantum particles were disturbing fields they were moving in, mostly by creating waves that moved ahead of the particles, like a pilot wave that you see in front of a boat. I’ve seen those from this window, looking at the boats on this bay. So, David Bohm talked about that as being disturbances in quantum fields. Then later they did some analog experiments that were like sending a droplet of oil skipping over a sheet of water, to show the kinds of effects that de Broglie suggested were happening at the quantum level.”

“Wait, what? Oil on water?”

“Yeah, you know how oil and water don’t mix, so when you shoot a droplet of oil across water, there’s a wave—”

“Show me,” she said.

“Well, I think it’s at a pretty small scale—”

“Show me!”

She was standing over him, hand out; when he took it, she pulled him to his feet. And then they had something to do.